Several legal experts say the Trump administration’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center seems to be premised on bogus, demonstrably false claims.
These critics include MS NOW legal analyst Joyce Vance, who said the Department of Justice’s main assertion — that the SPLC effectively funded white supremacist groups by paying informants to infiltrate the groups for research purposes — is ridiculous.
“The Justice Dept’s theory of the case — that the group that single-handedly disassembled the Ku Klux Klan defrauded its donors by concealing that it was using paid informant[s] to do that work and more — have about as much merit as the now-dismissed charges against Jim Comey, the charges against the members of Congress who never got indicted for telling service members they shouldn’t follow illegal orders, & the sandwich thrower a DC grand jury declined to indict,” Vance wrote on X.
Ryan Goodman, another legal expert, denounced the DOJ’s “false narrative” about the SPLC, while noting that the legal advocacy organization often shared its research with the FBI and openly discussed that relationship.
Best I can tell, most influencers in MAGA world are welcoming the indictment — no matter its legitimacy — for two primary reasons. For one, it marks the political targeting of a group known for tracking hate, including white supremacy. Far-right conservatives have publicly crusaded against groups and people who monitor the spread of harmful content online.
And second, some conservatives — including slain activist Charlie Kirk — have long derided the SPLC for including Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, on its digital map tracking hate across the nation.
But many MAGA influencers also see the indictment as a means of downplaying the existence of white supremacist groups and like-minded extremists. You can detect this in some of the responses from influencers who essentially argue that the indictment proves white supremacist extremism is little more than a liberal contrivance.
One post from content creator Clay Travis baselessly accuses the SPLC of staging “fake hate crimes.” Another, from MAGA propagandist Eric Daugherty, falsely claimed that the DOJ’s allegation that an SPLC informant helped plan the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, proved the event was “USED by Democrats as a hoax to paint ‘white supremacy’ to be larger than it is.”
An X post from the popular account Election Wizard similarly alleged that the “SPLC helped fund Charlottesville” and thus “helped shatter millions of liberal minds into permanent derangement.”
The SPLC has denied all claims of criminality. And to the organization’s credit, it certainly seems absurd to allege that a group that has worked with the DOJ to expose extremism has helped prop up extremist groups.
To be clear: MAGA influencers’ denial about the reality of white supremacist hate flies in the face of abundant evidence, including evidence compiled by Donald Trump’s first administration en route to its determination that white supremacists posed the greatest terrorist threat to the United States’ national security. But the denials from MAGA world speak to a historic trend of willful ignorance about white supremacy that dates back to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
I recently wrote about author and academic Elaine Frantz’s research on the history of “Klan skepticism and denial” during Reconstruction, after the end of legalized chattel slavery. The piece explains how a combination of conservative lawmakers, the news media and activists all helped promote the lie that the terroristic Ku Klux Klan — despite news reports and government investigations into its violent intimidation — either didn’t exist or was merely a group of pranksters being exaggerated by liberals.
Sound familiar?
It’s easy, for example, to read this excerpt from Frantz’s research and think about the ways Trump supporters have tried to downplay the threats posed by modern-day extremist groups such as the Proud Boys. She wrote:
Klan skeptics went well beyond due consideration of the prejudices that might have influenced the information they consumed. Rather than simply making a reasonable claim that information should be read with care, they posited that a gigantic and all-encompassing conspiracy between the government and the press to construct the Klan wholesale. Freedpeople’s testimony, according to this theory, when it was not simply a product of ignorance, had been bought or coerced by party leaders. Military officers’ and government officials’ reports were products of willful ignorance. Klansmen confessions had been coerced through the threat of harsh (and unjust) sentences or even through torture.
Keep this long history in mind the next time you hear conservatives peddling propaganda about the SPLC indictment.
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